


head is smokin',  feeling my heart is open

by pageleaf



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bondage, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, M/M, Multi, Pining, Texts From Last Night, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pageleaf/pseuds/pageleaf
Summary: Tonight, Lance has just finished his midnight patrol, and it's shaping up to be a relatively quiet Saturday night.
Absently, he thinks that he shouldn't be tempting fate, but like--come on, what could happen?
(Based off the TFLN (603): We broke the bed while I was handcuffed to the headboard and let's just say that was a hard one to explain to the RA)





	

**Author's Note:**

> somehow i managed to write a fic for this prompt where no one has sex on screen. no idea how! but, here we are.
> 
> all characters in a relationship are 18+
> 
> title from "love drunk" by little mix

Lance is having a pretty good night.

He's about two months into his senior year, and has enough of his requirements done that he's basically just coasting at this point. Sure, he's an RA this year, which puts a little more on his plate, but most of the kids in his hall are well-behaved. The biggest crisis he and Hunk have had to deal with so far was when one of the freshmen left their door open and left, coming back to find a sleep-deprived Pidge lying fast asleep on their floor. Tonight, Lance has just finished his midnight patrol, and it's shaping up to be a relatively quiet Saturday night.

Absently, he thinks that he shouldn't be tempting fate, but like--come on, what could happen?

There's a knock on his open door, and he looks up to see Maria, one of his freshmen, standing nervously on the doorway.

"Hey, what's up?" Lance puts down his phone and sits up.

"I heard a really loud noise from the room next to mine," Maria says. "Like something broke? I don't know if...you...wanted to make sure they're okay, or…"

Lance frowns. "What room are you?"

"302," Maria responds. "The room with the noise was 304."

"That's Keith's room." Keith's kind of a mess, but he's been quiet for all four years Lance has known him, so...this is odd. Lance gets out of bed and stretches. "All right, I'm sure nothing's wrong, but I can come check it out."

He walks Maria up to her room and pauses at Keith's door on the way back. "Hey, Keith, everything okay?"

There's no response except for a muffled _thump_ , so the jerk's clearly in there, he's just ignoring Lance. As usual.

"Keith, come on," Lance says exasperatedly. "You're scaring the freshmen."

There's whispers, and then: "Go away, Lance!"

Wait, whispers?

"Keith," Lance says with delight, grinning broadly, "do you have someone in there with you?"

"None of your business," Keith yells, but his voice cracks with...panic? Ah, jeez. Lance might be kind of a dick when it comes to Keith--and proud of it--but he's also Keith's RA, and it's his job to make sure no one in his hall gets into too much trouble.

Lance sighs. "Keith, if something's wrong, you know I'm the one you're supposed to talk to. If you want I can get someone else, but unless you want the whole floor to keep hearing us argue, you should probably decide."

Silence. After about a minute, the door cracks open enough for Lance to see Keith's suspicious glare and his bare chest peeking out from underneath that stupid jacket.

"Okay, you can't laugh," Keith says, and the worry fades from Lance's chest.

"No promises," he says, and pushes his way in. "All right, what seems to be the--"

He cuts himself off as he takes in the state of the room. It's a mess, clothes and books strewn all over the floor, but like. That's normal for a college student. What's less normal, however, is one of the metal bars that make up Keith's headboard, bent and broken out of place. What's even less normal (because hey, Lance could totally buy Keith getting pissed off and ripping his bed apart) is the naked man lying in the bed, handcuffed to the intact part of the headboard, a tiny corner of the bedsheet not quite preserving his modesty.

And best, or worst, of all: Lance knows him.

"Shiro," he says, in an embarrassingly high voice, and watches with horrified fascination as his art history instructor uses his free hand, with which he'd previously been covering his red face, to wave weakly.

"...hi, Lance," he says, clearly mortified.

"You broke the bed," Lance says inanely, because now it's all he can see--Shiro's right arm, silver and gleaming, one set of handcuffs dangling from the wrist, his left arm still cuffed to the other side of the headboard. Shiro, who Lance has lowkey been lusting after for months, naked and handcuffed. Shiro, naked and handcuffed in Keith's bed. "I didn't even know you were dating," is the next thing that comes out of Lance's mouth, as embarrassing as everything else he's done since he walked into the room.

"Everyone knows we're dating," Keith says in that same pissed-off tone.

"Well I didn't!"

"Lance," Shiro says carefully, "you caught Keith coming out of my office two days ago."

"I--didn't want to assume--" Lance rubs his face with a hand and decides not to try to argue against the clearly overwhelming evidence that he's the most oblivious bastard on the planet. "All right, so. What happened? You're both okay?"

Shiro attempts a smile. "Yeah, we're fine. I just got a little..."

He trails off, and Keith picks up easily with, " _We_ just got a little carried away. But I promise it was all--" He bites his lip. "Consensual."

"Fully," Shiro says. Lance probably didn't need that much emphasis, but hey, if his face is burning anyway, why shouldn't they go all in!

"O-kay," Lance says with forced casualness. "So I'm going to ask you, Keith," he fixes Keith with his best RA Stare, although judging by Keith's unimpressed look it doesn't work, "to fill out a service request to get your headboard replaced. You don't have to explain how it broke if you don't want." He very purposefully doesn't look at Shiro's pecs, or his _thighs_ , goddamn, which only look more obscene partially hidden under the sheets like that. Not, uh, that Lance is looking. "Anything else I can do for you?" he asks hoarsely.

Shiro tugs lightly at the cuffs on his left wrist, right hand folded neatly in his lap, and says, "We, uh, lost the key when the, um. The headboard broke."

"Oh!" Lance starts, tearing his eyes away from where they'd snagged on Shiro's lap, where he's--fuck--still half-hard. "Oh, yeah, of course. I think Pidge has a pair of bolt-cutters, she's right down the hall."

"I'll go," Keith says.

"Noooo, no," Lance orders, "you stay. I'll go." He takes the excuse like a lifeline and escapes, pausing when he's a little ways down the hallway to bang his head a little against the wall. Then he makes his way to Pidge's room and asks for the bolt-cutters.

Why on earth a sixteen-year-old prodigy sophomore needs bolt-cutters, Lance has no idea, but he's not going to question it when he needs them.

"...why do you need them?" Pidge asks, glasses glinting with poorly disguised curiosity.

"RA emergency," Lance says shortly, and Pidge lets out a small "oh" of understanding.

"Bring 'em back!" she calls after him when he takes them. "I need them tomorrow!"

He takes them back to Keith's room, lets Keith free Shiro (his own hands are a little unsteady), and hightails it out of there before they can thank him, returning the cutters to Pidge on his way.

Once he's safe in his own room--with the door _closed_ , he does not need any interruptions tonight--Lance sticks his hand down his pants and jerks off with the kind of desperation he hasn't felt since he was fifteen, trying the whole time not to think too much about what he's doing.

When he's done, and his head finally feels clear again, he collapses onto his bed with a deep, heartfelt sigh. "Jesus," he mutters to himself. "Who'd've thought."

 

Well, he might never have thought of it before, but Shiro and Keith fucking is all Lance can think of now.

It's like a constant loop in his head, flashes of Shiro's wrists in those cuffs, of Keith's strong, wiry forearms, of Shiro's fucking _muscles_. It's especially bad in class, when Lance has to sit in the front of the lecture hall and watch Shiro talk about abstract expressionism (or expressionist abstractism? maybe? who knows) and pretend like he's not staring at his neck, trying to find the spot where he _knows_ Keith left a mark, because he saw it. Now, this is a problem, because Lance is already lost in this course, so he can't handle this amount of distraction.

And Shiro, for his part, won't look him in the eye, which makes moving past it a lot harder. To be honest, Lance is...a little bit hurt by it. Does Shiro think he's going to react badly or something?

Or does he know that Lance can't stop thinking about him and his boyfriend? Is that why he's avoiding talking to him?

The thing is, Lance has been here before. Well, not here exactly, because this is kind of a special situation, but--he's been burned by good-looking guys before, who don't even want to be near him after finding out he might be into them.

It doesn't help, in this case, that the first guy to do it was Keith.

 

Lance has known Keith since Lance was an obnoxious, painfully bright-eyed freshman and Keith was the cool, distant sophomore living across the hall. Lance's crush had been immediate and stunning in its intensity; he'd alternated between stuttering around Keith and trying his best to get on his nerves for weeks.

But none of his tried and true attention-grabbing tactics had worked, because Keith had been awkwardly nice to him for a month before he realized that Lance _liked_ him, after which he never spoke to Lance again.

(And then he dropped out after his junior year and disappeared, only to come back when Lance was a senior and pretend he never knew him.)

 

It's this memory that's on his mind when class ends, and Lance stands and packs up in a daze.

"Hey, Lance," he hears from behind him, and turns to see Shiro smiling apologetically at him. "Follow me to my office?"

Lance trails behind Shiro to up the stairs to his tiny grad student office and stands awkwardly until Shiro tells him to sit down.

"I'm not mad at you," Shiro says, and Lance breathes out a sigh of relief.

Wait. "Why would you be mad!" he says, indignant. "I didn't do anything wrong!"

Shiro laughs ruefully. "You're right," he says, "and thanks for helping us out. You just...you looked worried."

Lance shifts awkwardly in the uncomfortable chair. "Yeah. I mean, you didn't call on me once today, and I actually had a question!"

Shiro raises an eyebrow. "Did you?"

Lance coughs. "Well, no, but I might've?"

"Lance," Shiro says, and sighs. "Look, I'm sorry. I promise I won't let it get mixed up with class if you won't, deal?" He holds out his hand.

After a moment, Lance reaches out and shakes it. "This is weird," he points out. "You know that, right?"

Shiro laughs again and ducks his head and fuck, he's so fucking good-looking, and whoops, Lance is still holding his hand. He lets it go in a hurry and tucks his hand underneath his thigh like he's trying to keep it out of trouble.

"Haha," Lance says, weakly. "I'm, uh--just going to go, if that's all?"

"Yeah, that's all." Shiro smiles again at him, sweet and unfettered with his earlier embarrassment. "I'll see you Thursday, Lance."

Lance nods at him jerkily and ducks out of the office, immediately going to the nearest bathroom and locking himself in one the stalls. "Yikes," he chides himself. "Pull yourself together."

He texts Hunk a quick, _hunk, muffin, help me, i'm dying_.

_what did you do?_ , is the response.

Lance sighs and tucks his phone back into his pocket.

 

When Lance gets back to the hall, he stops by Keith's room--just to check on the bed, he tells himself. To his surprise, though, Keith's door is open, inviting people to stop in and chat. If Keith ever left his door open before, he did it when Lance hadn't gotten to college yet.

Curiosity piqued, Lance raps on the doorjamb with his knuckles. "Keee-eith," he sings, "may I enter?"

"Yeah, come on in," Keith calls from behind his comic book. "What's up?"

Er, Lance thinks, why is he here? "Just making sure you got that service request in without problems," he makes up on the spot.

"Yep," Keith says placidly. Which is. Weird.

Lance feels that old, uncomfortable warmth hit him right in the chest, and it's the familiarity of it that causes him to make a decision.

"Hey, can I ask you a question?" He sits down on one of Keith's beat-up beanbags.

"Shoot." Keith turns a page, and Lance fidgets.

"Why did you pretend not to know me when you came back to school?" He looks down at his feet. "Did it really bother you that much, that I liked you?"

When he looks back up at the ensuing silence, it's to find Keith staring at him with wide eyes. "What?" Lance asks defensively.

"You—" Keith shakes his head like he's trying to clear it. "You still liked me? I thought." He shuts the comic book and sets it aside. "I thought you got over it like, the first semester."

Lance glares at him. "Yeah, well, thanks for thinking I'm that fickle. Dude, I had a crush on you for two years."

" _What_?" Keith sits up.

"I thought you knew," Lance says, a little disbelieving. "I thought that's why you were still ignoring me."

Keith presses fingers to his temple. "Ignoring you. Lance..."

"Don't tell me you weren't."

"No," Keith sighs. "I was, at first." And ouch, it's not Lance didn't know, but it still hurts a little. "I didn't know what to do with someone liking me, and you were so--much."

"Thanks," Lance growls.

"Lance." Keith drops his head into his hands. "I forgot. I was going through a _lot_ of shit those two years, and I honestly just forgot."

"Wait." Lance frowns. "You actually forgot you knew me when you came back?"

Keith shrugs. "Yeah. It took a while for me to get back into the normal school headspace. That year was..."

Lance leans forward. "Keith, what _happened_?"

Keith hesitates, and Lance is about to tell him that it's okay, he doesn't have to tell him, when Keith says, "It was Shiro. He had his accident."

Lance's response sticks in his throat. "Where he—"

"Yeah, where he lost his arm." Keith lifts his head, stares at the ceiling. "He was really hurting, and I needed to be there. It was pretty rough. But we got through it, and we're good now, we're better than good." He glances at Lance and shrugs again. "But that's why. Why I forgot. And by the time you reminded me, you already hated me, so I didn't think there was much point in trying to fix things."

"I don't hate you," Lance says blankly. "Why would you think that?"

Keith rolls his eyes. "Come on, Lance, Saturday was the first time you haven't been a dick to me since I came back."

"Because I was _mad_ ," Lance says. "Dude, you hurt my feelings. But I don't hate you, okay? In fact..." He trails off.

"What?" Keith turns to face him. "Lance, what?"

Lance laughs self-consciously. "Would you believe I never really stopped liking you?"

Keith's eyes go wide and stunned. "Lance," he says, too quiet. Shit.

"I'm gonna go," Lance says, before things can get more humiliating for him. "But, uh. Thanks. For talking."

Keith nods, still looking pole-axed as Lance leaves his room.

 

Lance tries to play it cool, but he's terrified he's fucked things up irreparably. Maybe if he...proves that he's mostly over it (over Keith, and Shiro, and Keith-and-Shiro), they can all just move past this?

Which is how he ends up sitting outside Shiro's office waiting for his 3:00PM office hours to start, with a gift-wrapped box cradled in his lap.

It's 3:05 when the door opens, and Keith strolls out, wiping a hand casually across his mouth. Lance's entire body flushes with heat.

"H-hey," he says. Keith stops dead and stares back at him.

"Hey."

"I, I'm here for Shiro's office hours, is he—"

"I'm ready," Shiro says, peeking his head out. "Sorry for the wait." He looks perfectly composed, but Lance's imagination still goes haywire, picturing in vivid technicolor all the things the two of them might've been doing.

Lance looks between Shiro and Keith and says breathlessly, "Yeah, no problem, doc."

Keith snorts and the tension fades, even as Shiro huffs. "I've told you not to call me that," he says, exasperated but--Lance hopes--fond. "I'm only in my second year, I won't have my PhD for a little while yet."

Lance trades a glance with Keith and Keith laughs, and wow, it's something to hear. Lance did that. Wow.

"I'm heading out," Keith says, and waves at Shiro. "See you tonight?"

"Yeah," Shiro says with that same warm smile Lance is familiar with, but with a depth of love to it that Lance can barely begin to comprehend. "See you then."

Lance sits down then, because his knees are a little weak. "I, uh," he says, and jesus, Lance, stop stuttering, "I got you something." He holds out the box and gathers his composure while Shiro inspects it with a frown.

"Lance," Shiro says, "I don't know..."

"Just open it."

Shiro looks at him warily but peels off the wrapping paper carefully, squinting at the unmarked box underneath.

"Oooopen it," Lance prods impatiently.

Shiro's mouth quirks into a smile, but it quickly drops open in shock when he opens the box. "Lance, what the hell."

Lance bites his lip to hide his grin when Shiro gingerly pulls out one of the red bondage cuffs.

"What, don't you like them?" Lance says, voice wavering with badly suppressed laughter. "I came all the way here just to give them to you."

Shiro drops the cuffs back in the box, face entirely pink, and Lance gives up and descends into giggles.

"They're velcro, so I thought it would help," Lance says between gasps. "No key to lose, and if you pull too hard, _they'll_ come apart, instead of the—"

"Oh my god, Lance," Shiro groans, closing the box hurriedly and covering his face with his hands. But he doesn't look mad, so Lance is going to keep on doing what he's doing. "Please shut up."

Lance cackles, tipping back in the chair with the force of his laughter. "Just looking out for you!" he says, and hops out of the chair. "Well, since that was the only reason I stopped by—"

"Jesus, Lance, you know these are my actual office hours, right?"

"Oh, like anyone else ever shows up." Lance smirks. "Except Keith, I mean."

Shiro glares at him. "Get out of my office," he growls, and Lance, still cackling, hops out of the chair and out the door, giving Shiro a jaunty wave on his way out.

He whistles on his way back to the hall, hands in his pockets, feeling like a weight's off his shoulders. There. Everything should be back to normal now, right?

To prove it to himself, Lance stops by Keith's room again.

"Hey," he says, rapping on the door, "I have a question for--oh hey!" Lance blinks. "They fixed the headboard, that was fast!"

"Yep," Keith says, and smiles at him. "Thanks for your help." His smiles turns faintly smirk-like as he says, "Speaking of which, I hear you got us a present?"

_Us_ , he says, like he's taking the present at face value, like he's actually thinking of using it.

Lance inhales sharply. Oh no, not back to normal. Not back to normal at all.

"Haha, yep," he says, as lightly as he can.

"Said they were pretty good quality, too," Keith muses. "You did your research, huh?"

"Yeah," Lance says, fidgeting. "I, uh--never do things by halves?"

Keith raises an eyebrow at him. "Still, that's a lot of effort to go to for a practical joke."

A joke. Right. _That's all it was_ , Lance reminds himself. He pastes on a grin. "Well, why waste my money on something that's no good?

Keith gets off the bed and steps up close to where Lance is still hovering by the doorway, gets right up in his space. Lance's grin disappears. "Thanks," Keith murmurs. "For taking care of us."

Lance's breath leaves his chest in a whoosh, and he stumbles back. "Whoa," he says, holding up his hands. "Keith, what are you doing."

"I thought I was being pretty clear," Keith says, sounding confused, sudden and uncharacteristic smoothness gone.

"Keith, are you seriously hitting on me right now?" Lance says in disbelief, and Keith frowns.

"I--yeah?" His brow furrows and he says, "I thought--or do you not still--"

Lance leans back heavily against the wall and shuts the door to the hallway. The last thing he needs is for the rest of the hall to get wind of this. "What the hell, Keith? You're the last person I'd expect to cheat on his boyfriend, especially a boyfriend like _Shiro_."

" _Cheat_ on?" Keith says incredulously. "Lance, there's no way you're this dense."

Wait. What?

Lance crosses his arms defensively and says, "Okay, so how would you describe flirting with someone other than your boyfriend?"

Keith throws his hands up in the air. "Did you miss the part where I said 'taking care of _us_?' I was asking for me _and_ Shiro."

Lance gapes at him. "What?"

"I'm talking about polyamory, Lance!" Keith shouts, exasperated, and yikes, dorm walls are pretty thin; there's no way Maria next door isn't getting an education. "Or at the very least a threesome, but I know we want more than that, and I'm pretty sure you do, too." He falters, then, voice going quiet and unsure. "Don't you?"

"I--" Lance inhales shakily. "I've never thought about it."

"Well…" Keith's shoulders come up around his ears. "Would you? Think about it?"

Lance blinks. "I don't think I really need to," he says in a daze.

Keith's face falls. "Oh?" he says. "Oh, okay. I guess if you really don't--"

"No, no, wait!" Lance holds out his hands to stop that train of thought before it goes too far. "I meant. That I, uh. I already know that I want it." He looks down at his feet. "You know I like you. You have to know I've got the hots for Shiro. If the two of you are really willing to...date me, then yeah. I'm on board, too."

"Really?" Keith's expression goes wide open and so genuinely pleased that it takes Lance's breath away.

"Yeah," he chokes out. "I really want to kiss you right now, can--"

He's cut off by Keith's mouth slamming into his, which, okay, it's what he wanted, although he had wanted to ease into it!

"Mmph," Lance moans, clutching at Keith's bony shoulders. Reluctantly, he forces himself back. "We've got time," he points out, "shouldn't we slow down until Shiro gets here?"

"I can't wait that long," Keith snaps, and pushes Lance back against the door, covering Lance's whole body with his own. He kisses him again. Lance doesn't argue.

 

When Shiro finally comes around hours later, Lance goes down to the entrance to let him in, since Shiro's too much of a rule-follower to break in. "Hey," Shiro says sweetly, casting a knowing eye over Lance's bruised lips, his rumpled clothes.

"Took you fucking long enough." Lance grabs him by the hand and leads him up to his room.

"Your room," Shiro says, with a note of surprise.

Lance blushes. "Yeah, we, uh." He scratches the back of his neck. "We moved. The rooms next to mine are empty, you know?" They'd relocated when Lance's whimpers had gotten a little too loud because hey, he doesn't really want to traumatize his kids.

Shiro snorts. "Good call."

Lance keys the door open and shuts it behind Shiro.

"Oh," Shiro breathes.

Keith's sprawled on the bed, entire body loose and relaxed with sleep. He looks too sweet, for someone who can be such a jerk. And Lance is so, so gone for him.

Though not as gone as Shiro, he sees when he chances a glance to his left. Shiro's mouth is parted slightly and he looks a little like he's been hit over the head, even though he's probably seen this same thing hundreds of times.

"You're really in love with him, huh?" Lance murmurs, and Shiro nods soundlessly, without hesitation.

"I was going to wake him up," Lance begins and Shiro's already making wide-eyed horrified "no" faces at him before he can even finish. "I was _going to_ to wake him up _like he asked me to_ to take advantage of the fact that we're all finally in the same bed, but you look like you'd rather take a nap."

"We can all still be in the same bed," Shiro says, frowning like he's trying to figure out the logistics of three men getting in the same tiny-ass bed. He's whispering. It's cute.

Lance smiles at him. "Yeah, okay, doc. You got it."


End file.
